The present invention relates to programs and systems that enable a user to interact with sites on a network, such as World Wide Web sites on the Internet.
The term World Wide Web (the "WWW" or the "web") is used variously to refer to (i) protocols that facilitate access to data through a web browser program presenting a graphical user interface to its user, or (ii) the set of pages that a user can access using such a web browser over the Internet. A web page will generally contain references to related material that are presented as links. By selecting (i.e., opening) a link, a user can access the referenced material. Using links, users can jump from one document (web page) to another, a process called browsing. The architecture of the web that provides these features has three parts: the server, which provides the information source, the browser, which takes the information and formats it in a particular way, and the network which provides the communication between the two.
Web pages are electronic documents are encoded in compliance with a HyperText Markup Language ("HTML") standard. HTML standards are generally promulgated by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), although some companies have promulgated their own extensions and versions. Background and current information about HTML can be found on the web site of the World Wide Web Consortium, whose URL is http://www.w3.org. HTML documents in the web context are generally referred to as pages or web pages. Web pages are text files containing content text (i.e., the information to be displayed to a user) and HTML instructions. Programs referred to as browsers (or, if needed for clarity, web browsers)--such Netscape Navigator, NCSA Mosaic, Lynx, and Microsoft Internet Explorer--are computer program applications that interpret the HTML instructions in an HTML document and, in accordance with the instructions, display the document's content to the user.
Links are HTMI instructions used within web pages to identify or locate hypertext elements, such as images, sounds, locations within the current web page, or other web pages. A reference to a web pages is generally a URL (a Uniform Resource Locator), which contains sufficient information to allow a web browser, interacting with a web server, to obtain the specific web page. Links are often displayed graphically on a displayed web page by text of a particular format or by a clickable icons. When the browser opens a link, the browser initiates a network connection (if necessary) to obtain the referenced element, which the browser then displays or plays, according to the nature of the element.